But in Sweden, not so much. In fact, the Supreme Administrative Court decided that drones able to carry cameras would be classified as surveillance equipment – and banned.

The ruling came after examination of Sweden’s strict privacy laws; many of which have not been updated since 1979. In equating all drones with cameras, commercial and recreational alike, as surveillance tools the country effectively banned their commercial use.

A few months later, industry outcry seemed to influence the court to soften it’s position, allowing the use of camera drones with permits. Professional drone operators complain that the complex permitting system still limits their ability to work; and is hopeful that a more thorough reversal of the law will be examined next year.

In the meantime, drone operators are making the effort to apply for permits – and some agencies are proving the point that drones are critical equipment. Missing People Sweden has applied for a permit across the country, Sputnik news reports, and has appeared on Swedish Radio to emphasize the importance of drones in search and rescue operations.

In his clever 1938 story Glimpse, golden age great Manly Wade Wellman wrote about a kind of controllable, flying eye:

From a drawer in the stand, Dundonald took a small cotton-filled box. Carefully be extracted from it what seemed to be a crystal marble less than an inch in diameter. His faint smile widened. Within the small compass of this simple-looking pellet was lodged a tiny mechanism, the most delicate and revolutionary in the world.

First of all, there was within it the power to see and register images. The development of that power had required years of heart-straining research and experimentation in photomechanics. His materials had included wires and screens of the most costly elements, as minute in their exquisite accuracy as they were gigantic in their conception.

Too, he had employed nerve tissues of animals, treated to do things that they had never attained during their organic life. Included with this power was another - that of independent and almost limitless flight, occasioned by a diminutive motor that could receive and use at a distance the current from Dundonald's dynamos. The crystal ball was, in short, an eye. An eye that could not only see, but fly, roam, travel at speeds and in directions to suit its operator, transmitting its impressions across the intervening space.
(Read more about the artificial eye drone)

I don't think that the Swedish Supremes would like the flying artificial eye...